The Addiction Algorithm
Punching Our Ticket to Huxley's Brave New World
Our lives in the digital 21st century are ruled by tens of thousands of digital algorithms. But here’s the one that matters most:
Chemical destiny minus meaningful ritual = addiction.
Here’s how it works, step by step:
We are wired for addiction by virtue of the simple fact that our brains are chemically motivated to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
All of our time is spent in relationships with various people and things.
The rituals we build around each of the relationships in our lives dictate how, where and with whom we spend almost all of our time and money.
There are two kinds of ritual: meaningful (those that contribute to and promote our physical, emotional, social and spiritual well being), and self-serving (those that contribute to and promote our obsessions and addictions).
Over the past two generations, the institutions (family, meaningful labor, education and organized religion) that once championed meaningful ritual, moderation and common sense in our lives have been obliterated, marginalized or co-opted by a deliberate, corporatist onslaught of digital narcotics.
We all became hopelessly addicted to an endless supply of digital narcotics as the meaningful rituals in our lives were destroyed and replaced by the rituals of our digital obsessions and addictions (all addictions, regardless of the narcotic, follow the same dynamic). By the early 21st century, addiction became the default social condition, the rule rather than the exception — by design.
We now live in a Brave New Digital World, a society ruled and controlled by a state-sanctioned meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital. Like the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, we are undone in the digital 21st century less by the things we fear, and more by the things we love and invite into our homes and lives. In the end, our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital steals our time and money and freedom — just like any other addiction to any other narcotic.
And now it is tearing our nation apart — again, by design…
Forward from the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" by Neil Postman, 1985:
We were keeping our eye on 1984.
When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside George Orwell's (1903-1950) 1984 (1949) dark vision, there was another-slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's (1894-1963) Brave New World (1932).
Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing.
Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression.
But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."
In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.
In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us.
Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
Every so often one trips upon someone who is able to puncture the bizarre insular bubbles of unreality we find ourselves in. This is right but how will people ever become unhooked. I did quit Facebook. At least for now.